It can be difficult to understand what connects free market devotees, white ethnostate militants, Christian Nationalists, tech bros and mere conservatives in the West. One concept that can help understand their rough alliance is traditionalism. In fact it draws together an international contingent that shares goals and enemies, shaping domestic and foreign policy against the interests of the majority.

The international rise of traditionalism became a quantum leap more obvious over recent weeks. Between calls for televised executions sponsored by Coke, the welcoming of the end of democracy, the beginning of the doom of American IVF and rampant Islamophobia in Britain, the eruptions are becoming louder. This week prospective US President Trump is welcoming the leader of Europe’s traditionalist illiberal movement, Viktor Orbán, at Mar-a-Lago.

Adherents of the esoteric heights of philosophical Traditionalism believe that we live in the depraved Age of Slaves – democracy – that must reach its destruction. Our current Kali Yuga, dark age, will be followed by a rebirth into the golden age, the theocratic Age of Priests, in this cyclical rhythm. It is a spiritual belief that demands hierarchy, order and an end to every poison that comes from the Modern age: reason, freedom, equality, progress. These ideas are inspired by the writings of René Guénon and Julius Evola.

Two of the most influential adherents are Steve Bannon, formerly Donald Trump’s first Chief Strategist, and Vladimir Putin’s alleged intellectual inspiration, Aleksandr Dugin. Benjamin Teitelbaum’s hours of interviews with Bannon, and other key figures in the global Right, on the subject are fascinating.

They are radicalising figures. West-loathing Dugin, for example, earned a number of travel bans by calling for genocide in Ukraine in 2014, to rid that valuable land of the “race of bastards.” He helped create in Russia “an atmosphere in which violent internal repression and armed foreign aggression seem natural.” For Dugin, and Putin, a Russian empire will lead this new age. Bannon proclaimed in 2013 that he wanted to destroy the American state and “bring everything crashing down.” Now Bannon runs his media campaign, which is understood to be a significant force on the MAGA+ Right, and plots to reignite his dream to unite Europe into a Traditionalist force. Bannon boasted of his time spent planning with Dugin.

Julius Evola, who shaped the key tenets of Guénon’s writing into its current form, is a pivotal figure feeding into libertarian apocalypticism amongst the tech bros and neo fascists of the internet, disseminated outwards from being the guide of self-styled intellectual fascists. Manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan and former-Murdoch darling Tucker Carlson have both amplified his ideas. These concepts infuse the ideology promoted by the neoreactionary inspiration of the tech magnates, and “leading intellectual figure on the New Right,” Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin shares the fascists’ goal to speed up the destruction of the Kali Yuga in Accelerationism. He schemes for the destruction of the government (and other liberal institutions such as academia, known collectively as the Cathedral) to be replaced by a monarchy. His essays were mainstreamed to the New Right by the Claremont Institute, an Atlas Network partner. Yarvin’s plan to unmake the government is now set out in clear steps by the Atlas-partner Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership. It is hardly surprising that the billionaire owners of the platforms of civil discourse are investing in potential boltholes in New Zealand, Hawaii and are shooting for Mars.

The popular version of traditionalism, by contrast with this “philosophical” version, appears a nostalgia for a past that never existed. Instead its proponents create a past whitened of sin and pain which narrative they mandate as the only truth. This traditionalism is a site of rampant hypocrisy: a cavalcade of adulterers pontificate about the sacredness of the family and the sinfulness of the diverse modern world. It is a mechanism for control, deployed by people who resent the power they’ve been forced to share with communities they despise. While some only wish to recreate that past, with no care for how differently others experienced the White men’s better days, for others the intentions are extreme.

Populist traditionalism ties together the bigotries against shared enemies of the international Right. Unlike the spiritual racism of the esoterics (handily borrowing Aryan ideals that lighter skin means higher caste and more priestly), this version is overtly biologically and essentially racist. While China is a primary international target of the movement, the most violent bigotry is directed at Muslims, denoted as Brown, and whose lives, according to the Right, are clearly worthless. This aspect of traditionalism unites the currently acceptable Hindu nationalists with the currently acceptable Israeli Jewish nationalists.

Thus in Britain, the Conservative Party Whip lost his role over vile Islamophobic comments. Much of the longterm Tory Islamophobia is spelt out by politicians of ministerial seniority, often from immigrant origins themselves. India and Israel have deep political connections, to a substantial extent united by Islamophobia. Former Secretary of State for the Home Department Suella Braverman depicted ceasefire rallies, calling for an end to the slaughter of innocents in Palestine, as “hate marches.” Any support for human rights by a multicultural array of Britons – White and Black, Jewish bloc, and Muslim Brits – is thus depicted as a violent Muslim insurgency and a sign that they are not fit to live in Britain.

This fits with recent investigations into Paul Marshall, the hedge-fund multi-millionaire, and the beliefs implied by his Twitter (X) activity. Marshall has retweeted calls for a range of Islamophobic arguments including the mass deportation of immigrants. Marshall is a major funder of GB News (Britain’s equivalent to US Fox News or Sky Australia), UnHerd, and has put in a bid to buy The Telegraph, the preeminent “conservative” paper in Britain. He is also one of the founding supporters of the Atlas-linked Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, funding its global anti-climate action agenda and its mission to impose traditionalist values.

In America, Donald Trump is also calling for mass deportation of immigrants. Steve Bannon predicted that these would encompass at least 14 million people. Logistics suggest this scale would be impossible, but the targeting of Brown Americans and residents will be ghastly. Trump’s “top immigration adviser,” Stephen Miller authored the plan to take children – even babies from their mothers’ arms – because crossing the border to apply for asylum made their parents “criminals,” based on his White supremacist beliefs. He is now strategising to assemble an ad hoc army for a military operation that will seize people in mass raids across the country, place them in concentration camps, then apparently deport them in multiple flights each day, overriding all their rights. He intends Republican state armies to invade resistant Democrat states. This sounds like civil war.

Esoteric Traditionalism demands patriarchy. Populist traditionalism unites American Christian Nationalists with the range of MAGA Trumpists in their determination to enforce the nuclear family as the central unit of order. They intend to control people’s sexuality. LGBTQIA+ sexuality and identities are to be eliminated; people who won’t be “cured” will be killed. Women are to be constrained to the home and subordination to a husband. The demarcation of IVF as a current target denotes both that there will be no reproduction without God, and also that birth control is the next target. Already figures are arguing that birth control harms women physically and socially. Life beginning at conception eliminates several key methods of contraception as the start of the new battle that will join abortion-elimination in the battle to deny all reproductive rights. The Right also has begun fighting no-fault divorce (despite the fact that there was as much as a 16% reduction in female suicide after states introduced no-fault divorce). It is not just the belief that women must be returned to their place that drives these measures: this Western Right also promotes natalism – the idea that White women must breed to prevent “race suicide.”

The recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland was a hotbed of traditionalist radicalisation of the Trumpist base. Trump also declared himself ready to claim “ultimate and absolute revenge” on his opponents. Jack Posobiec is a conspiracist and Lincoln Fellow at the formerly prestigious Atlas Network-partner, the Claremont Institute. He claimed, in typical trolling rightwing spirit that his comments were satirical, but this is the way the movement has long mainstreamed ideas. He said: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely.” Typical of a number of speakers at the event, he promoted the attempt to overturn the last election: “We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.” It is hardly surprising that this iteration of the event allowed open Neo Nazis to spruik antisemitic propaganda: there is considerable overlap in the projects now.

Another key Trump-supporter, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA, has illustrated how biological racism is core to the new Right with even the Republican Party’s bowdlerised vision of Martin Luther King Jr to be abandoned. This deployment of MLK to appeal to Black voters has been superseded by the depiction of Black people as essentially inferior and a threat. Kirk also argued, in a dog-whistling display that his listeners know refers to Black people, that executions should be shown on television and children made to watch. He joked that Coke should sponsor that exhibition.

Steve Bannon spoke with Tucker Carlson late in 2023 promoting the Great Replacement conspiracy. Both men evoked a White-race-hating “elite” replacing uncontrollable White populations with manageable non-White immigrants. Bannon praised Viktor Orban as the “political and … public intellectual leader of this.” Carlson has interviewed and praised both Orbán and Putin for his radicalised audience, displaying both electoral authoritarian regimes as models. Putin has been described as a neo-Stalinist dictator, so supporting his more violent measures can inflict costs on the less ostentatious Right. Orbán, leaning towards subtle authoritarianism is a lower-cost role model. Orbán has much to gain from Republicans’ strategic support of Putin’s military goals, and a longterm observer of the authoritarian-admiring Right believes Republicans aim to leave eastern and maybe central Europe for Putin to take. It is debatable whether racism or “family values” bigotry is a stronger driving force in the Putin and Orban traditionalist sphere. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat argued in her study of authoritarians that the “big continuity and constant is homophobia…even more than race.” Viktor Orbán’s prioritising of the “traditional family” and targeting of LGBTQIA people certainly makes him a hero on this Right. Traditionalism ultimately embraces both forms of prejudice as required.

Several Australian Liberal Party grandees and apparatchiks are integrated into the Orbán traditionalist propaganda campaign. Tony Abbott decried “immigrants swarming across the borders in Europe.” Alexander Downer disdained immigrant “bantustans.” Both seem fixed in the “Clash of Civilisations” mentality that characterised the 9/11 aftermath. Kevin Andrews complained that “[p]opular ideas and current lifestyle choices militate against the acceptance of appropriate policy responses” to a purported birthrate crisis. This natalist position allows no scope for lives that don’t promote breeding within sacred marriage. Last year Downer spoke at another Orbán event, criticising the Left’s “divisiveness” caused by “identity politics.” Thus the traditionalists delegitimise voices that experience life differently: we would be united if the rest would only accept straight, White, “Christian” men’s experience as the only reality. News Corp’s Greg Sheridan criticised the “green madness” which is the “new religion” taught in schools, signalling the fossil fuel agenda entwined with this ideology. It’s likely these Australians’ traditionalism is populist (as one imagines is the traditionalism of Orbán and Putin); it remains to be seen whether any esoteric Traditionalists number amongst them. Regardless, they too despise the democratic project that allows freedom to their “woke” enemies.

Opinion-writers are trying to suggest that democracy is more resilient than our worst fears have portended. As Protect Democracy senior lawyers pointed out recently, however, the USA played its Get out of Jail card when Biden was finally named Trump’s replacement on the night of the 6th. It is valuable to understand this illiberal movement as a process of “competitive authoritarianism,” where the democratic project is hollowed out until the incumbent can no longer be ousted, as appears to be the achievement for Orban. The election itself remains but it is increasingly meaningless. Where our democratic projects worked for so many years to extend the franchise to men without property, to women, to non-White people, now the efforts work to reverse the goals as these traditionalists aim to entrench themselves as the new aristocrats. In Australia, Tony Abbott tried to resuscitate knights and dames. In Britain, departing Prime Ministers install Atlas Network figures into the House of Lords to shape the country more directly. In the US, notable figures have begun to echo radical Right talking points that women should not have the vote; working people have long struggled to vote there with elections held on weekdays, and fewer booths in poorer districts. Anti-majoritarian mechanisms pervade their system. Republicans now speciously boast that the USA was never a democracy as part of the efforts to kill such flawed representation as they allow.

Nostalgia for a mythic past pervades internationally-connected, far-right movements and it is closely allied to the neoliberal project. The Atlas Network is the primary driver of the neoliberal alliance globally. Its forces have been integrated into the populist-nativist Right in Europe, and they are now driving the American democratic project further towards authoritarianism. The forces allied around the Atlas Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for a new Republican president are formidable and far more organised than Trump’s team was in 2017 when they carried out two-thirds of Heritage’s previous Mandate for Leadership. Project 2025’s Advisory Board combines many Atlas partner bodies with a range of the Christian Nationalist organisations that make up the Council for National Policy (CNP). The new Mandate lists many oppressive social policies intended to be carried out by a President functioning mostly by executive action, overriding a devastated federal workforce where 50,000 are to be sacked. (Ron DeSantis’s vow to start “slitting throats” of federal workers in August was echoed by a Trump supporter beheading his federal-employee father and broadcasting the head on social media in a “Call to arms for American Patriots.”) The often-traditionalist libertarian donor class and the Christofascists are now more closely aligned in goals than they have ever been.

The 2025 Mandate provides again the evidence that these traditionalists know their goals are minoritarian, but they will impose them on the majority using any authoritarian mechanism they can devise.

If they succeed in winning a Trump victory, it will also mean a rolling back of Biden’s impressive program promoting the transition to renewables. It will mean a crumbling of any nascent global effort to combat the climate catastrophe. This is hardly surprising since many of the plutocrats who fund the junktanks in the Atlas Network and the CNP stem from the fossil fuel sector. The support for Russian imperial goals, alongside other petrostates, will hasten the climate catastrophe.

Australians might believe a Trump victory’s social implications remain distant for us, but our rightwing parties seem determined to impose their minoritarian will like their American role models. Liberal politicians, Atlas-connected Advance – unfortunately aided by an awkwardly-timed police mistake – worked to inflame nativist-populist grievance in a by-election last weekend. Policy is abandoned; divisive propaganda is the replacement. These politicians continue to support nuclear reactors primarily as a further delay on climate action and, when we experience the climate catastrophe as a worse permacrisis than we might have, will do the bare minimum to support affected communities.

The traditionalism that is being promoted by the Radical Right around the world will doom us all, but not before stripping our freedoms.